Ep. #4, Creating a Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy

Andrea Echstenkamper: When you're first starting out, you aren't sure which channels are gonna work for you.

Malia Powers: There's no longer a silver bullet.

Andrea: There are a couple channels that I think are particularly suited to early startups. Successful content marketing is more about telling a story. Content marketing has gone from something nascent to a must-have.

Malia: Ultimately, you know, when you're out there, you're raising awareness for yourself, you're also raising awareness for your product at the same time.

Welcome to the Pitch Room. I am Malia Powers with Heavybit. On this show, we regularly talk about all things PR, including current events, crisis comms, PR tools and tips, reputation management, all with a special focus on developer communications.

Each episode will bring you actionable tactics and strategies that you can implement today for real business results. If you are interested in being a guest or have a subject that you would like to hear about, email us at press at heavybit.com.

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Pitch Room. Today we're going to be discussing marketing channels for early stage startups and the importance of thought leadership. Great to have Andrea Echstenkamper with us today. Andrea is the head of marketing for Heavybit member company LaunchDarkly.

Andrea: Oh, thanks so much, Malia. It's great to be here. As you mentioned, I lead marketing for LaunchDarkly. For our listeners who may not know LaunchDarkly, it helps software teams build better software faster and with less risk.

We've created what is essentially feature flags as a service so developers can manage their whole feature cycle from launch to sunsetting. It's a tool that basically makes you able to do smarter continuous delivery. Previously I was doing demand generation for Hazelcast and in-memory data grid before leading marketing there.

Choosing and Testing Channels

Malia: Great. Well, thanks for joining us today again. Andrea, given your role in marketing, I thought we could talk a little bit about marketing channels for startups. Channel marketing does have a very broad definition.

For our listeners, the way we're going to be talking about multi-channel channels today is going to be how companies interact with customers both directly and indirectly. So with the rise of social networks and very sophisticated digital platforms, the rules for channel marketing have really changed. Andrea, do you have any overall marketing channel advice?

Andrea: Sure. So when you're first starting out, you aren't sure which channels are gonna work for you. And there's a daunting number of things to try, from SEO strategies to engineering-created marketing initiatives to viral to referral channels.

And it's best to put in some process around how to prioritize and test these so you can be more systematic and remove some of the biases that you have about certain channels.

One way to do this is to score channels on three dimensions. How well you anticipate they will work, how quickly you can test them, and the cost to do so.

And once you find the ones that are working, then you can make the investments in scalable implementations. There's a great book called Traction that came out last year by Gabriel Weinberg, and that does a really good job of outlining this process.

Malia: Yeah, I agree that process is really important. And another tip that helps with your three priorities of work and quickly testing and cost is to devise campaigns that can span multiple channels easily. Expecting customers to adopt the company's preferred channel is pretty unrealistic.

So you do need to be able to cater and tailor campaigns to fit multiple channels, which leads us to an open question about what channels we should be focusing on.

Channels for Early Startups

Andrea: Sure. So, you know, what I mentioned before about prioritizing, there are a couple channels that I think are particularly suited to early startups. And the first may be obvious, but the first I'd say is social and display ads.

And I'm not talking about doing an $8,000 banner buyout on DZone. I'm talking about a small buy on Twitter here for a couple days or a campaign for a week on LinkedIn.

The advantages of this channel at an early stage are threefold. One is that often startups are posting on social anyway, making boosting a post a super simple action. Two would be that it's a platform for testing new approaches. You can get feedback really quickly on a new messaging direction or the strength of an offering that you're putting out there.

And then three is that you can get information about your target audience. On LinkedIn, you can test a hypothesis about who your target is by targeting users by job title. In Twitter, you can target by keyword or other Twitter account followers to see where the opportunities are for SEO and partner marketing, respectively.

Overall, these mini experiments will tune your barometer to what's working.

And unlike AdWords, it doesn't require a huge budget.

Malia: Another strategy or channel is marketing through community events. Meetups are a great way to engage with your users face to face, develop a community around a product, which is particularly important for developer startups.

Andrea: Yeah, I agree.

Malia: I do know LaunchDarkly recently had a packed meetup on mobile continuous delivery.

Andrea: Yeah, we recently had a couple that have gone really well, and the advantages for us are beyond just reaching particular customers and being kind of thought leaders by holding such a meetup, but also the feedback that we get for our engineers and for marketing and everyone else and the way we can come together as a company around it.

Malia: Yeah, and another important channel that I think kind of infiltrates all the channels that we mentioned is content marketing. Content marketing is becoming kind of the necessary evil for all companies these days.

One tip that I have is that the best content for a company is writing about what you know well and then targeting vertical audiences who are most likely going to use that product.

And I could dig into the different vehicles for content marketing, including social sites like Twitter and LinkedIn, your blog, your website. But I think the key takeaway here is that startups should begin creating a content marketing strategy as part of their overall marketing mix and utilizing analytic tools better to really understand their audiences, to create the most engaging content that will ultimately drive customer loyalty and sales.

Andrea: So another piece to display ads is retargeting, which is essentially serving up ads only to those who have visited your website. On Google AdWords, you can pay for clicks and not impressions, so you're only paying when you re-engage someone in your pipeline.

You can make sure potential users don't get away without seeing your main call to action. Get a free trial, sign up for free, etc. And it makes you feel like you have a bigger presence. Wow, these guys are everywhere, you kind of start to think.

This is especially good since a lot of early startups don't have the resources to dedicate to building out a full email nurturing plan. And this is another way to get folks further down the funnel. A company that has had a lot of success with social and display ads is New Relic.

They do a stellar job of this, ads with a big, bold red button and a strong offer of free t-shirts. One of them I think that says Data Nerd, which I think I knew about the t-shirt before I knew about the company.

It worked for them really well and it fit in well with their kind of bottom-up freemium model. Another channel to test early on is email marketing. Direct marketing has been around for a long time, but it still works, especially with modern tactics. Modern email marketing subscribes to more drip campaigns and more personal tones to elicit a response.

Malia: Can you explain what a drip campaign is?

Andrea: Sure. So a drip campaign is when you're getting ready with an email campaign with kind of three different emails in mind. So you're setting one to go out a week after your first email, another one a couple weeks after that.

Malia: So, like a regular cadence of contact.

Andrea: A good example of email marketing is Airbnb. They attribute a lot of their early success to emailing directly those who have listed their vacation homes on Craigslist and they convince them kind of in a one-to-one way to move over to their platform.

Email marketing can also help you learn what business model will work for you. That's another reason that it's great to try early. Do you need a lead development function or is your product better suited for self-service? You may have no luck in display but get response from direct contact and offers for demo.

What PR and Marketing Learn from Each Other

Malia: Great. Well, that was a really great overview about the different channels that you can be using for marketing. And the content for these marketing campaigns is really gonna have a high collaboration between the PR departments and the marketing departments.

Sometimes for our smaller startups at Heavybit, oftentimes that's the same person, but even if it is the same person, it's gonna take a very high level of collaboration. And I think there's certainly best practices that each department can take away from one another. Marketing definitely has its strengths as well as PR.

Andrea: Yeah, and you and I have been working here at Heavybit together for quite a while and there are a lot of things that I've learned already that I can apply from the way that you approach PR to the way I approach marketing.

And one thing I can think of is that, you know, specifically content marketing has gone from something nascent as a concept a couple years ago to a must-have that every marketer must do. And some marketers are struggling with the growth of content marketing because content is essentially different from what they're accustomed to.

Successful content marketing is more about telling a story. It's not about being self-promotional. A lot of times a marketer is caught up in call to actions and ways to get someone to react in a more explicit way rather than backing up and thinking about a brand story or about a movement that we're a part of.

So PR can help marketers get more into that top of funnel mindset and also help with structuring messages for drip campaigns later on in the funnel.

Malia: Yeah, and I think one of the strengths of marketing is that its ability to really measure and get technical, like you mentioned. Social media and smartphones have really led to a fractured audience in the end of a news as an event. No longer are you reading the newspaper with your coffee.

So we're receiving this kind of aggregate of news and feed form news, which is really difficult for PR pros to really measure how they're targeting their audiences. There's no longer a silver bullet. Measuring how we're moving the needle is a bigger challenge than it really has been before.

And from a client perspective, PR is frequently looked at as a cost center instead of a profit center, which is typically why marketing and PR budgets tend to be cut first.

So what PR pros can take from marketing is how they measure the actions that they inspire instead of just the number of eyeballs they secure. Marketers are great at how many leads are nurtured, how campaigns have impacted SEO, A/B test content to figure out what has the most content. So while there's a high level of collaboration, I think there's definitely things each department can learn from one another.

Andrea: Oh, that's interesting to hear your perspective.

Thought Leadership

Malia: And one last thing I wanted to hit on, especially with you here, Andrea, is thought leadership. Thought leaders are informed opinion leaders, really the go-to people in their field of expertise. Especially for startups in a really hyper-competitive environment, thought leadership can be a really powerful mythology for generating new business. Andrea, your CEO at LaunchDarkly really is an incredible thought leader in the continuous delivery space.

Andrea: She definitely is. I'm really lucky to have a CEO, Edith Harbaugh, that has made that a priority and she's really, really great at it. You know, to be a thought leader, you not only have to have these high, interesting thoughts, but also find a way to make it demonstrative, ways to distribute the subject matter expertise that you have.

Edith hosts a podcast series, To Be Continuous, about continuous delivery here at Heavybit together with CircleCI CEO Paul Biggar. They give highly applicable case studies of companies doing continuous delivery, but also their own experiences. They're two experts that kind of can break apart some of the high-level conversations that people are having in the Bay Area about the new frontier of software development.

Malia: Yeah, I was at lunch the other day with Edith and she said to me, she was like, "You know, Malia, the thing that you never know about CEOs is that they are writing a lot of essays." And Edith is a great example of really doing multi-channel marketing.

She contributes to blogs. She has a regular byline in DevOps as well as ReadWrite, active on social. I believe she's also speaking at an upcoming conference.

Andrea: Correct. Yeah, Web Summit in Dublin.

Malia: Yeah, I think that's the largest technology conference in Europe, another great opportunity to expose your brand, be a thought leader. There's probably hundreds of media members there, set up meetings. So that's the way to do it, kind of hitting everything at all angles.

Andrea: Yeah, I agree. When you see a speaker continuously at, you know, DevOps conferences or Java conferences, you start recognizing their faces, you start realizing that this is an important person out there.

Malia: Yeah, it really does take a regular cadence of coverage. Something that a lot of founders come to me and they say, you know, last time I got an article in TechCrunch and I want a different outlet this time.

One thing that is recommended is to continue to be a regular contributor to one, maybe for a six-month, eight-month period of time to get a following, because they say it takes a couple of times before someone's really able to recognize your name and acknowledge you as a thought leader. So one strategy is to be very focused on some outlets with those target readers and then kind of continue to move on.

Andrea: Oh, that's great advice. And I think it's also kind of using something I really subscribe in marketing, is finding something that's working for you and making it really scalable. And something like a series when it comes to content marketing is really effective that way. If you've already laid out that you're doing 10 articles on a certain topic or a series of podcasts, you're able to really keep that cadence.

Malia: Yeah, the power of thought leadership. We're just really seeing a growing number of managing partners, senior executives, all the way down to some of the more junior level taking really a lot of action to become thought leaders because they're just seeing such big business benefits from it.

Because ultimately, you know, when you're out there, you're raising awareness for yourself, you're also raising awareness for your product at the same time.

Andrea: Yeah, that's great advice.

Malia: And this concludes our episode of the Pitch Room. Thank you very much for joining us.

Andrea: Thank you, Malia.

Malia: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Pitch Room, brought to you by Heavybit. Heavybit is a nine-month program and community for developer-facing startups. For more information, visit heavybit.com.